Première: MGMT’s Hallucinatory New Video About Death

Starring Alex Karpovsky, of “Girls,” the video for the band’s new song “When You Die” is both beguiling and horrifying.

When the synth-pop duo MGMT released their début album, “Oracular
Spectacular,” in 2007, three of its songs became instant hits. “Electric
Feel” was an arboreal psychedelic sex anthem that could have served as
a soundtrack to “Avatar”; “Kids” and “Time to Pretend” were stranger,
combining lilting melodies with an unsettling, ironic sense of freaky
foreboding. These were songs about growing up in which death loomed
large; it was as though Andrew VanWyngarden, MGMT’s singer, had seen a
vision of someone hitting life’s fast-forward button, skipping directly
from youth to the end. Record executives probably wish the band would
write more party tunes in the vein of “Electric Feel.” Instead, MGMT has
continued its journey to the dark side. Although the band’s music has
remained hummable, the vibe has grown more ruminative and gothic: two
of the best songs on its last album, “MGMT,” from 2013, were called
“Introspection” and “I Love You Too, Death.”

MGMT’s new album, which comes out in February, continues the trend:
it’s called “Little Dark Age,” and its newest single, “When You Die,”
envisions exactly that. “You die / and words don’t do anything,”
VanWyngarden sings. “It’s permanently night / and I won’t feel
anything.” All the while, cheery melodies and a driving pulse make this state of nothingness sound hypnotic and inviting. The
music video is both beguiling and horrifying. It stars Alex Karpovsky,
of “Girls,” as a magician. He seems to be arguing with someone in his
mind. He dies, then returns, then dies again. The video uses a novel
digital technique to show the surfaces of the world transforming.
Sometimes everything seems flat, like a pattern in a carpet; at other
moments, it’s nebulous and made of stars, or biological, as though the
whole universe were built from fingers or eyeballs. Later, inexplicably, we are flying through a desolate, endless landscape
of mesas and canyons: this is death. The video is mystical and
dreamlike, a slice of life as it unravels.

Electronic music is propulsive—the
steady beat promises to take us somewhere. In some songs, it seems to
go higher and higher; in others, it spirals deeper and deeper. MGMT’s
songs are in this second category. Their surfaces are bewitching, but
it’s their haunted interiors that make you want to listen again and
again.

Joshua Rothman is The New Yorker’s archive editor. He is also a frequent contributor to newyorker.com, where he writes about books and ideas.

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Video

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